India
has entered a new era of convergence, whereby a mobile subscriber is able to
make use of a variety of services at one time. Users are able to make calls,
browse the Internet, send emails, and instant messages, simultaneously, courtesy
the 3G services offered by the state-run operators. The 3G game will become all
the more thrilling once the private players join in.
Data will take center stage
in the coming years with carpet roll out of 3G and 4G; and it will definitely be
a solace for the providers whose ARPU figures are not so promising. However,
things will not be just the same as they used to be while billing a user for
voice, SMS, and a few value added services over 2G. IDC in one of its papers
said that the wireless industry has to undergo a major revision to its approach
to the OSS/BSS, during the age of technological advancements in the networks.
The silo-ed atmosphere or the legacy infrastructure prevailing in service
provider environment will bring in tough situations for them when service
providers start delivering these services. They will need to provision, monitor,
and bill for an intricate web of services, technologies, and offerings.
The emergence of these
attractive new services bring challenges to service providers in terms of need
for enhanced billing capabilities to support needs for enhanced pricing for
these content services, scaling up for increased transaction volume and size,
complexities in binding transactions to an event record, need for transparent
settlement with content partners. Billing providers will have to support all
these services and functionalities required for 3G, to enable service providers
accrue revenues. Challenges will also occur from service offerings that combine
voice and data (like video telephony/conferencing).
Also, operators, in order to
leverage their investments for 3G services, will need to increase the ARPU of
existing customers and attract new customers. Since they can introduce a number
of services with the help of 3G, they have the option of creating innovative
bundles for customers for customer acquisition and up selling. Hence, for
operators, pricing, bundling, and packaging becomes very important.
The 3G Billing Maze
So what is the great fuss over billing for 3G? "The biggest difference in
billing for 3G services is the need to interface with IP network elements and
the myriad rating options required to charge for data services," says Pushpendra Mankad, senior VP, Comverse (Asia).
The new technology will bring
in more bandwidth for telecom operators in the country, and they will need to
capitalize on additional services that can be delivered on this infrastructure.
Given this scenario, the number of services that can be provided will increase
and the time-to-market these services will need to decrease. "Billing will need
to become more flexible and allow for new variations/options of services made
available to subscribers. Many new services that were once being offered in a
postpaid environment will also be available to the prepaid subscribers, and the
billing process will have to accommodate this flexibility," says K Nanda Kumar,
CEO, SunTec.
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For BSS service providers, the challenge will increase
manifold in managing high user experience
Sanjoy Sen, head, solution sales, carrier segment,
Aricent |
Without a good strategy for handling this scenario, service
providers may find it difficult to support the introduction of new services
Stephen Cooper, VP, product management, Subex |
The biggest difference in billing for 3G services is the
need to interface with IP network elements and the myriad rating options
required to charge for data services
Pushpendra Mankad, senior VP, Comverse (Asia) |
A unification of processes
and mechanisms will be needed to ensure that both prepaid and postpaid
subscribers can access similar services, he adds.
Bikram Singh Bedi, VP, India
and South Asia, Intec Telecom Systems, agrees. He says most operators at present
do not have platforms that give them a single view of both kind of its
subscribers.
3G in India will be driven by
user experience, says Sanjoy Sen, head, solution sales, carrier segment, Aricent.
He says, "For BSS service providers, the challenge will increase manifold in
managing high user experience. A single wrongly billed service will send the
entire effort to develop quality experience for a toss."
Operators should bring in the
flexibility to offer multiple services to customers with multiple options, like
service combinations, billing parameters, billing cycle intervals, etc. Making
customers understand the billing process is another big challenge. The presented
bill should be simple enough to be understandable to customers and need to
comprise all of their services.
Mission 3G Billing
Without a good strategy for handling this scenario, service providers
may find it difficult to support the introduction of new services, says Stephen
Cooper, VP, Product Management, Subex.
| The Must List |
With 3G in the picture, billing must support
more of data related services, its rating, its charging, and how easily new
products and services can be made available in the market
- Be real-time: To perform balance management and
authorization for 3G services, the billing system must return a price for
an ordered good or service in a sub-second timeframe, even though the
rating scheme may be far more complex than required for voice traffic
- Accommodate all current and future types of services
(including voice, video, content, and enhanced data services)
- Be agile to quickly bring sophisticated promotions and
bundles of advanced services to market, to both incentivize initial use
and meet the unique needs of market segments
- Enable customers to perform their own customer care
via web or any hand-held device
- Support functionality for settlements between various
parties in the content value chain
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The BSS service providers do
not see billing for 3G as a cakewalk. Wipro's head, OSS/BSS practice, Prabir
Bishayee says, "There will be hurdles in deciding where and how to assess the
value of content moving across networks, how to deliver content developed and
provided by third parties, and charge for them as well as manage settlements.
Managing settlements will be a Herculean task."
Investments
As of now many operators are working on silos in terms of product specific
billing infrastructure. 3G may not deliver to its full potential under such an
environment. Apart from the need to revamp their network support systems and
switching to a real-time infrastructure; it is important that operators switch
to modern, highly scalable and flexible, modern billing infrastructure that can
enable them to rollout innovative services on the fly. This will enable them to
reap the maximum out of 3G deployments as well as provide simplicity of a single
bill across services. "This means to have maximum returns as they will need to
invest strategically in a non-intrusive billing system," says Kumar.
Operators need to upgrade
their platforms in a manner that makes them flexible and agile in order to be
able to rapidly introduce these services. It is difficult to predict which new
services will be successful. "Things such as service catalogs containing
reusable building blocks can allow service providers to capitalize on their
network investments by rolling out new and innovative services, utilizing
existing processes, and service components, enabling rapid time-to-market at a
reduced cost," says Cooper.
A revenue operations center
(ROC) easily allows operators to do just that. A ROC is a centralized approach
that sustains profitable growth and financial health through coordinated
operational control. Thus, helping CSPs to not only deliver new services
rapidly, but to do it profitably, he adds.
Some legacy billing solutions
are simply incapable of charging for anything other than voice and simple
messaging services. Operators must determine whether their existing
infrastructure meets the new requirements made necessary by the introduction of
data services, and whether any shortcomings can be efficiently addressed through
product upgrades. Major customizations are often more risky and expensive than
investing in a modern product based solution that will meet both immediate and
future needs.
"Investments could vary for
every operator, as there are some operators using legacy solution that date back
to 2000. For them migration to newer versions will be like starting from
scratch," says Bedi.
The key attributes to
leverage new services into convertible revenue streams are time-to-market new
products and services, bundling of products and services, opening up the billing
system to support most of the open standards so that readily available data
applications can be supported and integrated with the BSS.
And flexibility to quickly
alter and change the way you charge for services like time based, duration
based, content based, context based, location based, and a combination of all of
these.
The Correct Way
Pricing is a tool that helps service providers to compete as well as
differentiate from competitors effectively. So when operators start offering 3G
services, different price models need to be examined to effectively price the
products and services. Stratecast, a leading analyst body believes that some
basic models such as the all-you-can-eat flat rate need to be fundamentally
rethought or at least prices subsidized with high margin services in the
advanced network market.
Ovum also expressed that the
wireless carriers need to embrace the death-of-the-minute and move past it in
terms of billing.
"So as 3G is making its
clutch in the industry, BSS providers need to provide advanced pricing features
to enable support for IP services. Pricing models like pay-per-use/view,
content/context based pricing and per-second billing is the need of the hour,"
says Kumar.
| Modular Models |
Billing for mobile advertisements delivered to consumers
- Billing third parties for access to subscribers: Banks, travel agents,
stock brokers and similar entities that can be billed for secure access to
mobile subscribers
- Billing subscribers directly for everything, including content: This
scenario would generate a convergent bill that resembles a credit card
statement, giving service providers a complete control of the relationship
and maximizing the value of the customer relationship
- Billing content providers for access: Subscribers might pay content
providers directly and service providers might receive a commission. This
type of approach would simplify logistics for operators, but would also
burden subscribers with multiple bills
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The big challenge is to
establish pricing paradigms that approximate the value consumers place on the
expanding offering of services. To be able to access parameters like amount of
data (MB), uploading or downloading of data, QoS, location, and content.
Billing for 3G will be very
different from the current event based charging models. Communication service
providers will certainly seek to bill subscribers directly for some services.
However, there will be different models for it.
Partner management will be a
key challenge as the operator will now have to negotiate not only with one or
two value added services providers, but it may go up to in many hundreds.
"The settlement agreements
with all the partners may not be the same. One settlement may have to be made on
a daily basis and for the other on a weekly basis, definitely there might be
many disputes as well," says Bedi.
The Deadly Combo
With the advent of 3G services, operators could offer innovative and
differentiated value added services which could go a long way in creating
customer loyalty, thus reducing churn in the post MNP telecom environment, say
Prabir Bishayee of Wipro Technologies.
Keeping the MNP and 3G
billing challenges in mind, a combination of these two actually increases the
chances for the thoughtful operators. Pricing becomes extremely important in
such an environment. As 3G helps the introduction of a number of services,
operators will have more tools in hand to create customer friendly bundles and
packages. This will help a lot in increasing ARPU of existing customers and
acquiring customers from competitors. And with MNP coming in operators stand a
greater chance of winning customers and retaining them if they are served on
time with the right packages, prices, and benefits.
A scenario where 3G and MNP
coexist will be very complex and highly competitive, where user experience will
play a key role and billing a vital aspect of it.
Heena Jhingan
heenaj@cybermedia.co.in
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